


Like Being Free

by andreaphobia



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, M/M, Modern AU, Reincarnation, Reincarnation AU, Road Trips, Silly Boys, angry boys, pretension - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-02
Updated: 2014-02-02
Packaged: 2018-01-10 21:26:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1164715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andreaphobia/pseuds/andreaphobia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Say, Jaeger,” he says in a conversational tone, sliding into the passenger’s seat, “you know I hate you, right?”</p><p>Eren gives him a sideways crooked grin, kind of warped round the edges, maybe a little hungry.</p><p>“I know,” he says, frankly. “Why do you think I asked you?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Being Free

Grisha Jaeger’s piece of shit pickup truck shows up at Jean’s house at three AM, and the only thing to herald its appearance is a late-night phone call that goes something like this:

_“Kirschtein.”_

_“What.”_

_“Let’s skip town.”_

_“Fuck off.”_

_“C’mon.”_

_“Ask your friends.”_

_“They’ll never go for it. It’s gotta be you.”_

_“Yeah? Doesn’t ‘_ gotta be’ _anyone.”_

 _“_ Kirschtein _.”_

_“What?”_

_“Please.”_

Fuck _, he thinks, and wants dearly to hit someone. “Fuck,” he says. “Fine. When?”_

_“Now.”_

_“—the fuck?!”_

So, it’s fuck o’clock in the morning, and he’s waiting on the curb with his hands in his pockets and a duffel bag at his feet. Eren leans over from the driver’s side to open the door for him, and Jean heaves his bag in and then follows it. The bag contains his wallet and driver’s license, his cellphone and its charger, toothbrush, couple pairs of clean underwear, a shirt or two, and the glasses that he never wears outside because he looks stupid in glasses. This bag will be the entirety of his life until Eren fucking Jaeger manages to work through whatever crazy shit he’s gotten into his head tonight.

“Say, Jaeger,” he says in a conversational tone, sliding into the passenger’s seat, “you know I hate you, right?”

Eren gives him a sideways crooked grin, kind of warped round the edges, maybe a little hungry.

“I know,” he says, frankly. “Why do you think I asked you?”

*

  
Another thing he hates about Eren, come to think of it, is his shit-ass taste in music.

“Who the fuck listens to _Heart_? What are you, my mom?”

Eren shudders melodramatically. “I sure fuckin’ hope not.”

“Oh, fuck you.”

There’s a thoughtful silence, broken only by Ann Wilson’s crooning. Jean reaches over and switches off the CD player. Eren turns it back on, drums his fingers on the steering wheel as punctuation. Then more silence.

“…Where we going, anyway?”

“Coast.”

“Why?”

But Eren, sheepish, only rubs the back of his neck. Jean knows him well enough by now to know that that means _You’re gonna think this is really stupid, but…_ so he says “Spit it out,” wearily.

It’s still a whole mile more down the road before Eren mumbles, “Wanna see the ocean.”

Jean stares. He’d known Jaeger was stupid, but every new day surprised him with deeper depths of dumbshittery.

“You grew up in _California_ ,” he says.

“North bay,” Eren protests. “Cooler up there. Not really beach weather.”

“So? Didn’t say you wanted to swim in it, right? Just to look at the damn thing?”

Eren doesn’t answer. Jean sighs, leans back in the seat, pulls his hair back out of his eyes. Lets it drop again. He can’t decide what’s more rotten—the fact that Jaeger said it _had_ to be him, or the fact that that was what convinced him to come.

“Fine,” he says, sighing, weary of world and everything in it. “Fine. We’re going to the beach. If you’d told me I’d have brought swim trunks.”

The relief in Jaeger’s eyes makes him want to hit something again. He settles for punching the mushy leather padding of the armrest on the passenger’s side door like it’s a pillow he’s trying to beat into shape.

“See? I knew you’d understand,” Eren says, all smug and vindicated.

Jean puts his head down and shuts his eyes. If he starts now, he can probably get a couple hours shuteye before the sun rises.

“Shut up. Gonna sleep. Don’t wake me up unless there’s food.”

He catches the tail end of Eren’s sarcastic murmur of _Only the best for you, Kirschtein,_ but by then he’s already asleep.

*

In the end what he wakes up for is diner food. _Fuck_ , he hates diner food. Probably even more than Jaeger, and that’s saying something.

Another hour or two and they’ll be at the coast. The waitress brings him a cup of joe with a little lipstick on the rim. He wipes it off with his shirt sleeve while Eren picks at the bedraggled coleslaw on the side of his plate.

“Just finish your damn food if you’re gonna eat it at all,” Jean tells him. Eren does a lazy roll of the eyes, a _yes-mom_ kind of look, and stabs the cabbage. Such a little shit, Jean thinks.

Eren’s phone starts to buzz, dancing wildly towards the edge of the table. Before it falls off, he catches it, glances at the screen then switches it off.

Jean raises his eyebrows. Catching his eye, Eren shrugs.

“‘s Mikasa. She’s blowing up my phone.”

Jean stares at the dregs at the bottom of his coffee cup, swilling them around. “You didn’t tell her?”

“No.” Defensive. “Why should I?”

“She’s your sister, right?”

“Adopted,” says Eren sulkily.

Jean eyes him. “Y’know, it’s creepy the way you always bring that up.”

“Well, _‘strue_.”

“Still.”

“Still,” Eren mocks. Then shuts up, because the look Jean gives him could kill.

Getting back in the car after almost-breakfast is another trial.

“You wanna drive for a bit?” Eren asks before he swings himself up into the driver’s side.

“Do I get carte blanche over the radio?”

“No.”

“Then forget it.”

Eren smirks at him, turning the volume up. “You just don’t appreciate good music.”

*

Jean has never really got the weird human fascination with the ocean. People wrote songs about it, odes to it—even Led Zep had one—and there’s all those books about the whales and the marlins and whatnot… but when you really got down to it, all it was, right, was a metric fuck-ton of water. And an hour later, there they are, looking at it.

“There,” he says, pointing wildly, but nearly any direction’ll do when it stretches from horizon to horizon. “There’s your damn beach. Have at it. Go nuts.”

Eren ignores him. Takes off his shoes, ratty sneakers he’s probably been wearing for years, rolls up his jeans, and walks barefoot down to the edge of the surf. It mists around his toes, his ankles. He looks back suddenly; Jean breathes in, half a gasp, and swallows briney air. Seagulls weeping, circling overhead and the ocean breeze rubs invisible fingers through Eren’s hair.

Jean follows him, but shoes still on, stops short of the water. The crunch of sand and gravel underfoot is satisfying.

“‘slike being free,” says Eren, after a bit, raising his voice to be heard over the surf.

“Didn’t know you had a patriotic bone in your body, Jaeger.”

“Not like _that_. Like—fuck.” He scrubs at his face, then stamps his feet a little in the shallow water like he’s trying to wake himself up. “Can’t explain it. Just—if it was you… if you were here… I thought, maybe I wouldn’t have to.”

He turns to look at Jean. His eyes are wide, faraway, like he’s trying to focus on something hovering between them, unsaid, a soap-bubble thought, an untouchable impermeable truth.

And suddenly, Jean is afraid.

The water licks its way up to Jean’s sneakers and he takes a step back, but Eren reaches out, grabs his sleeve.

“I’ve been thinking,” he starts again.

“ _That’s_ new,” Jean blurts out.

“Will you shut _up_ for one fucking minute? I’ve been thinking, okay, that nothing is right and nothing is real, and that everything isn’t where it should be. How fucking crazy is that, right?” He laughs, lets go of Jean’s sleeve. “And last night… last night, I just couldn’t take it anymore. Had to go _somewhere_. Somewhere else.” He looks down, stares at his toes as he flexes them in the sand. “But this is real… right? It’s all real. I’m right here.”

The uncertainty in his voice scares Jean. Not because he thinks Eren’s crazy, but because they both are. Without being told, Eren is describing a feeling that Jean has had, his entire life. It’s not some kind of stupid pubescent fantasy about really belonging to some higher plane of reality, nothing so lofty as that. It’s just the persistent, niggling thought that everything is fundamentally _wrong_ with the world, and that one day everything is going to snap back all at once, and the world will be… forever changed.

“Are you fucking high or something,” is what comes out of Jean’s mouth, but when Eren looks at him again he realizes his voice is shaking. Eren grabs his sleeve and he tries to pull away and then the world spins, the ground rushes up and he’s flat on his back and breathless, staring up at a colorless sky. The packed wet sand feels good under him, solid, something to anchor himself against. Solid like Eren’s hands flat on his chest, steady like Eren’s stare.

“You see?” Eren whispers against his mouth. “Knew you’d understand.”

*

After that, there’s no more talking. Just the sensation of drowning, the water washing up along their sides… and some rather enthusiastic mouth-to-mouth.

*

Probably he’s making a stupid mistake. No, he _definitely_ is, because waking up next to Eren Jaeger isn’t something he’s going to ever, ever mention to anyone unless he’s also going to kill them afterwards.

He doesn’t remember how they got there exactly. There was the beach, a little wet sand on Eren’s cheek which he rubbed away with a thumb. Eren was making it hard to breathe and his hair was damp and stuck to his face. It was dark enough that he didn’t even mind that Eren was pulling him along by the hand, although by then he was probably a little drunk. (Drunk without a drop of alcohol in his system; that’s another thing he’s never going to tell anyone about.) Jaeger’s idea of romance is a bed in a motel room instead of the bed of his dad’s truck, which is pretty representative of everything that’s happened so far. And afterwards he has a smoke while thumbing aimlessly through the Gideon Bible and gets ash on the sheets, which is fucking disgusting but Jean is too tired to care. The clock on the bedside table reads two and six and the sound of the highway drums through the window, a distant roar like the ocean.

Jean lifts his head, then lets it sink back down. The pillow smells only faintly stale. That’s probably about as good as he could hope for.

“Got what you came for,” he says, muzzily, and wondering as he says it just how much of this was premeditated. “When we goin’ back?” Eren’s phone is sitting next to the clock, he notices, out of the corner of his eye. It’s still off.

“When the world ends,” Eren says. Then jumps and laughs when Jean pinches his thigh.

“Tomorrow?”

Eren gives this due consideration. He stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray on his side, and then rolls over, rolls onto Jean, cleaves their bare bodies together. The heat of it is stifling, but better than thinking, better than feeling the wrongness under the surface of everything. He shoves his face into the pillow to get away but that doesn’t stop Eren, who murmurs in his ear, “Maybe the day after.”

And Jean can’t resist. He never fucking could.


End file.
